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SysAdmin Horror Stories?

heh if your gonna be a sysadmin, dont work in a college
the kids are not what get to ya, its the professors, they are actually dumber than the kids, its very scary, here is an example from yesterday

ring ring "hi we are down in st327 and we can find the remote to the projector" "did you look on the cart" "yes" "ok ok, ill be right down"
here comes the joke, how many professors does it take to find a remote sitting on top of a projector, answer 1 and 2 TA's :shock:

Lets see... I had to set up a printserver to serv to mac os9 and X, windows, and linux. Windows and linux wasnt too bad.. It was only a small server, so I just had samba use cups...and well, cups covered the linux box (2 linux boxen on the network, 1 the server, 1 the client). OSX wasnt that bad, but I had some freaky issues due to their cups frontend, it has some problems i think. The painful thing was os9, because it doesnt support unix printing protocols atall, and it doesnt support SMB by default...and I didnt want to dish out the $$ for DAVE (adds smb support to mac os*). And dont get me started on appletalk print sharing. I got file sharing to work good, but printserving.......*shivers*

So we got this order to build these beautiful dual Xeon 2.4Ghz boxen, and somehow were shafted with having to put HPT370 based raid cards in them, and run them in... gah! hardware raid! Bleh! So the Driver from Highpoint only covers up to RH9, this card is 4 years old afterall right? So, one of the other guys at work, an evil cuss, who keeps stealing my sandwich, convinces the client to run RH9, and so the hardware raid works, but now the intel gigE cards don't since the RH default kernel is about as old as a gas station sandwich, which that cheeky co-worker would steal anyway! Well, he sends me an IM on my day off daring me to compile a 2.4.26 that'll work with the raid card... so first I try using the Highpoint driver since its stripped of version symboling in an initrd with a 2.4.26, then I try the in-kernel driver which uses a funky device node instead of just sdX its /dev/ataraid/dXpY, and none of this poop works, but I could never watch the panic and page up to see what I'm doing wrong... I'm on compile 4 and what happens? cheeky sandwich theif just says, "never mind, I got the e1000 source and got that to compile against the default kernel"

Man, you can never win sometimes...

And then there was the dd war with the Adaptec 1210SA... you know if a card is supposed to do hardware raid, it better well have RAM on it!

One time we forgot to allow one of our domain names through on the external SMTP server at my old job (we had just replaced it with a new one and for some reason that part of the postfix config didn't make it over.) That was a *lot* of e-mail that bounced back to a *lot* of angry clients...

Admin this..............

I worked at a state U maintaining 40+ copy machines and over 100 laser printers (comp-lab lans) Best job I ever had. I sure didn't know what a sys admin was but people with that title keep pulling my buns outa the fire. The student workers (lab help-desk and the "LAN TEAM") were very patient with me.
Also where I started to hear about Linux

The "contract-service provider" I worked for was a typewriter repair shop!

In two years I only had 4 or 5 cases of vandalism, and it was not serious. I loved that job, why did I go to China?